BBC iPlayer Now Supports "Series Stacking," MPEG-4/H.264

--Will Shortly be Available on Nokia N96 Phones

The BBC has enabled "series stacking"--i.e. the ability to catch up with episodes of a show beyond seven days after their transmission--on the BBC iPlayer and on its program sites (note: previously, the iPlayer only allowed viewers to catch up with shows from the past week). As a result, iPlayer users and visitors to the BBC's Web site can now access up to 13 previous episodes of a number of BBC shows, including a range of shows from the Corporation's fall schedule. The BBC says that it plans to eventually extend series stacking to its iPlayer for TV services (such as the one offered by Virgin Media) and to online download services. Shows now offering series stacking include the new BBC One dramas, "Merlin," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "Little Dorrit" and "Survivors"; factual series from BBC Two, such as "The History of Climate Change" and "Bruce Parry's Amazon"; BBC Three's new comedy show, "Clone"; and BBC Four's "Walking with Beeching" and "The Story of Maths." "Now you'll be able to join a series half way through, following a friend's recommendation, and catch up on all the previous episodes--or watch them all in one go over a weekend," Simon Nelson, controller of multiplatform and portfolio for BBC Vision, said in a prepared statement. "Series stacking marks a key development in our strategy to let audiences view our programs whenever and wherever they want."

The BBC Trust, the body that is responsible for public oversight of the Corporation, originally granted the BBC approval for series stacking in April, 2007. In its approvals, it set an annual quota for series stacking of no more than 15% of all television content offered on-demand (note: the quota is to be applied as an average throughout the year). This guideline is scheduled to be reviewed after two years. In addition, the BBC says that series stacking will only be available for a show's first-run transmission.

In related news:

• The BBC iPlayer now supports delivery of programming using MPEG-4/H.264 encoding with AAC+ audio. In a blog posting on the BBC's Web site, director of Future Media & Technology, Erik Huggers, explained that he believes the BBC needs to adopt such open standards across the board: "The BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards," he wrote. "Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the Web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions." MPEG-4 encoding will enable data rates of 800kbps, compared to 500kbps for the proprietary VP6 format (from On2) that was previously used by the iPlayer (note: in order to take advantage of MPEG-4 compression, iPlayer users must install the latest version of Adobe Flash). The switch to MPEG-4 is designed, among other things, to support a recent increase in the iPlayer's resolution to 640x360.
• The BBC will make the iPlayer service available on Nokia N96 phones starting October 1st, allowing end-users to both download and stream programming. In order to access the service on their N96 phones, end-user will first have to download a special widget from the BBC's Web site (though the widget will also be pre-loaded on certain phone models). "Over the past eight months, we have worked tirelessly to ensure BBC iPlayer is available on as many platforms as possible, from PCs and TV to games consoles and mobiles," Huggers said in a prepared statement. "This partnership is critical to ensuring we continue to reach out to audiences wherever they are and allow them to catch-up on their favorite BBC programs." A version of the iPlayer service is also available on the Apple iPhone.